Book review: Bigfoot

Buhs has written a detailed history of the Yeti/Sasquatch/Bigfoot complex of ideas, beginning with the first sightings of Yeti tracks and ending with the present day, when Bigfoot's defenders have begun to die off. Reading this book made it clear just how incomplete and slanted most of the other books are. For example, the footprints photographed in the Himalayas by Eric Shipton brought the Yeti to Western notice and are mentioned in most histories, but I never knew that Sir Edmund Hillary headed a later expedition to investigate the footprints and concluded that they were the footprint of some small animals distorted by melting of the snow. Roger Patterson, who obtained the famous walking-Sasquatch footage, was a shady character, but Ray Wallace's later claims of helping fake the film are probably false; Wallace told many other tall tales. (The footage is probably fake, but Wallace was almost certainly not involved.) Grover Krantz was overly confident of his fraud-detecting skills, and his book "Big Footprints" wasn't the airtight case for the Sasquatch's existence he thought.

Sasquatch legends are reasonably viewed as a descendant of the wild-man legends that are found all over the world; wild-men have been seen as gods, demons, saintly hermits, lost tribes of Indians, and unknown animal species, depending on the cultural context they're interpreted from. Buhs's history is detailed and enlightening, but I'm less convinced about his social analysis of the 20th-century resurgence of Bigfoot stories, an analysis that might well be correct but is not supported with much actual evidence here. He suggests that belief in Bigfoot was largely a working-class phenomenon, that extolled common sense and first-hand experience over elitist science, and in some convoluted way was a reaction to the rise of consumer culture.

But several aspects of the Bigfoot phenomenon -- disdain for academic egg-heads and their supposedly wilful blindness, the preference for anecdotes and not analysis, squabbling and backstabbing between fellow believers -- are part and parcel of many other pseudoscientific belief complexes. Alternative medicine, for example, is primarly a middle- and upper-class belief, but they're equally disdainful of the blinked medical establishment and reliant on motivational anecdotes. I completely fail to understand why Blu places belief in Bigfoot in opposition to consumer culture; why couldn't it be driven by masculinity, as shown by the image of hunters setting out to capture a dangerous beast using gun or camera? Or why not argue that Bigfoot is an image of wildness in an increasingly secure and restricted culture.